Halloween and How-we-been

“Why does Halloween celebrate death, scary monsters and bloody messes?” My curious kids recently asked me this obvious question. Candy and costumes cloud the origins – whether we believe it honors the dead or is an ancient harvest festival – Halloween now revels in the dark and devilish. Why is there such a deep difference in what this hallowed evening originally observed and how it manifests today? Does it matter if we remember and honor the dead? Why has Halloween, a celebration of what we have been, turned into a horror show?

Today’s world centers on the science and math of the material world, while delegating matters of the spirit and soul to religion, philosophy, and weirdos. The underlying message of our economy-centric society is that the esoteric is really inconsequential. The passing on of our ancestor’s life map, has been replaced by a fixation on fake numbers and constant online engagement. For some this has been a wellspring of knowledge and cosmic connections. For many others it is strong stimulation of the senses, but scarce on human presence.

Our modern classroom lessons lay the foundation of humanity represented only by the last few thousand years of civilization. These empires are presented as the epoch of human progress and the whole of our history. We reinforce this tale with our heroes, celebrities, and leaders. But what of the previous hundreds of thousands of years of the human journey. This code is buried deep within our DNA, the same way innate knowing tells the birds how to fly south and gives the bees their hive blueprints. Have we perhaps forgotten our innate awareness?

Ghosts and ghouls don’t seem like an appropriate memorial for the great spirits that seeded the strengths of the human species and gave us the understanding to thrive for thousands upon thousands of years. The characters of continuous warfare create our ongoing world story, but do not represent the true passion of our past. On the contrary – our present world “order” is but a blip in time that will fade away as nature rejects life forms so out of balance with the natural systems.

If we are simply slabs of meat that have no access to the heavens until we die, then what we have now on Earth may make some sort of morbid sense. However, if we have lost our ancestral intelligence, forging a future without this accumulated wisdom could be a pretty big problem. Honoring and remembering the lessons, values, character, and goodness of our dearly departed may be essential to our future.

The Halloween costumes of the future could celebrate the culture, agriculture, music, dance, art, and stories that were left by past souls who have lived and learned. The Earth could never have survived this long if humans had always lived with the priorities and perspectives of our era. We can harness our history and build a future that is distinctly different from the current grid system that demotes the human spirit to the hedonistic, gruesome and grotesque during a time that was once reserved for a hallowed evening of remembrance and respect.